Big Girls Having Fun: Reflections on a ‘fat accepting space’

Abstract

Recent work in Fat Studies has begun to develop academic, artistic, online and real-life narratives, events and activist interventions that provide challenges and alternatives to dominant and harmful understandings of the fat body and fatness more generally. Implicit within this body of work and associated activities is a discursive, political and practical manoeuvre to re-figure ‘the fat subject’ which in some instances involves the creation of ‘fat accepting spaces’. Such spaces aim to facilitate the acceptance of fat bodies and fatness and in some cases the celebration of fat bodies by acknowledging their rights, experiences and desires. This article critically interrogates one such ‘fat accepting space’ by drawing on qualitative fieldwork carried out at a nightclub event for Big Beautiful Women (BBW) and Big Handsome Men (BHM) and their admirers (FA or fat admirers) called LargeLife. The article will explore the ambiguities and tensions of fat accepting and acceptance through considering examples of ‘feeling and facilitating acceptance’, ‘dancing’ and ‘admiring’. These examples will draw attention to the temporal and spatial contingency of fat acceptance in the club, the presence of different fat subjectivities, including those with bodies with or are planning to have gastric bands and the role of fat (male) admirers in determining which bodies are or are not ‘accepted’.